I finally asked the question I’ve wanted to ask for years
Join me in overanalyzing one voter interaction I had in New Hampshire
This thing happened on my latest campaign swing – a few days I spent in Iowa leading up to the caucuses, immediately followed by a few days in New Hampshire.
I was getting out of my rental car a few hours ahead of a Trump rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when a woman driving by rolled down her window.
“Must be cold for you up here!” she said. She was maybe around 60, petite, glasses, thick New Hampshah accent.
I looked at her, baffled. She nodded toward my rental’s license plate. “You came all the way from South Carolina!”
I explained that I was in fact a reporter and that this car was a rental. She looked a little crestfallen.
“You’re here for the Trump rally?” I asked.
She was, and she proceeded to tell me how great Trump rallies are, how much she loves the former president, and especially how awful the media is – how unfair they (we) are to President Trump.
I asked her if she would park and let me interview her. She hesitated for a few seconds but agreed.
Our conversation lasted about 10 minutes, and this voter (let’s call her Betty) (I can’t remember her name at the moment, and it doesn’t really matter) had a lot of standard Trump-voter opinions: drill baby drill, Ron DeSantis betrayed Trump, I don’t like that Nikki Haley, Biden is bad for America.
I said thank you, and as Betty was walking away, I decided to ask the thing I’ve wanted to ask dozens, maybe hundreds of voters before:
“Hey: if the media is so bad, why did you stop to talk to me?”
Betty cocked her head, thought for a moment. “You seem friendly!”
And that was that.
—
Two things:
1) I promise I’m not telling this story as a way of going [flaps hands] oooooh look at meeeee I’m so good at talking to Everyday People because I’m especially warm and friendly and nice.
2) I also promise that this isn’t going to be a lecture on how everyone needs to go out and meet people who are different from them in order to change opinions and thereby change America’s broken politics and thereby heal the world.
OK, and a third thing:
3) A warning here – this post is not going to have a neat and tidy takeaway. I’m still trying to figure out what to make of my conversation with Betty.
Back to my point #2. I have been turning this interaction over and over in my head for a week now. In recent years, I have had many voters – mostly but not entirely Republicans – tell me how awful The Media is.
This sentiment often comes minutes into a polite and informative conversation, almost never with an acknowledgement that I – the person with whom they are having this polite, informative conversation – am a member of The Media.
I had often wanted to ask these people what on earth they were doing talking to me, then. I was glad I finally asked, even if the answer was anticlimactic.
—
So I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s anything I learned here.
In the hours immediately after our interaction, I thought so. I had a few moments of saccharine, cotton-candy thinking: maybe if Betty met enough nice reporters, she would think that the mainstream news media isn’t so bad, that we’re doing our best to inform the public, that we don’t have to be the enemy.
This isn’t a new idea – that if people just talk to other people, particularly those who are different from them, everyone will just get along in peace and harmony. It’s the kind of broad, generalizing “but we’re so POLARIZED and it’s AWFUL and we can FIX IT by being HUMAN” platitude you can hear from any number of pundits.
[digression]
In fact, here’s a fun political science aside: there was a study a few years ago about how when gay people went door-knocking, forcing gay marriage opponents to just meet nice, friendly gay people in person, the opponents lo and behold grew measurably less opposed to gay marriage.
Except then, some political scientists debunked the study, saying the data looked suspect and maybe even fabricated. A loss for just-be-nice-and-reach-out proponents the world over.
Except THEN, the debunkers went and did their own, similar study on voters’ attitudes towards transgender people. What they found is that talking to a canvasser did shift voter attitudes long-term. But there was a twist: the canvasser didn’t have to be trans themselves, or even LGBTQ; it could be anyone!
Point being, I don’t know…maybe even talking to nice-seeming lady with a giant microphone made Betty hate reporters a little less! Maybe. Maybe we reporters just need to organize a giant canvassing campaign, where people talk to each other about their feelings toward the news media.
Except…
[end digression]
So many people – particularly Donald Trump, not to mention partisan news sources – have a vested interest in convincing Americans that the mainstream news is not to be trusted. That messaging isn’t going away. Given that, how could you ever hope to deprogram anyone? Could pleasant interactions with reporters really reverse any of that?
I think here about one of the best reporting tips I ever got. Years ago, I told a fellow reporter that I was going to my first Trump rally.
“Get all your voter interviews before the rally. You’ll never get them after,” he said.
Why?
“Because Trump will point at the press riser and tell everyone how bad you are and get people booing at you,” he said. “And the people who might be nice and talkative to you beforehand will absolutely hate you afterwards.”
Again: how do you counter that?
—
Right now, you might be piping up: Danielle, doesn’t Betty have good reason to distrust you – doesn’t the news media has a liberal bias?
[digression number 2]
(Answer: I mean, if I had to guess, I’d guess the Washington political press corps members are largely center-left on a personal level (emphasis on the “center”), but part of the job is to try to leave our biases out of it, and it’s something we work hard at, and many reporters I think do a damn good job of it on a partisan/ideological level, though sometimes yeah that bias does creep through, just as reporters also sometimes overcorrect, which also results in truly bad feats of reporting.)
(At any rate, I think the idea that The Media has a liberal bias is overblown and oversimplified (as if The Media were one big centrally run entity), even if there are examples of that liberal bias in action, and here I’m thinking of the reaction to “binders full of women.”)
(Answer, continued: Really, there are so many other biases we historically haven’t talked about enough – classist, sexist, racist – that creep into our reporting, not to mention tendencies toward horse-race coverage, toward oversimplification, toward navel-gazing self-flagellation (see: wringing hands over “but whyyyyyyy did we not see the Trump movement COMING? Do we not UNDERSTAND MIDDLE AMERICA well enough? Are we BAD coastal elite jerks who need to visit more diners?”))
(Really, though: often I think that if anything, our most pernicious bias as political reporters is that we tend to think about bias purely on a left-right ideological level and not on other levels.)
(But back to the question: to the degree that media bias exists, antipathy towards The Media outstrips it, born in large part of manipulation and opportunism.)
(And a final point: even politicians who sow distrust in the mainstream media cite that very mainstream media when it serves their purposes. Go figure.)
[end digression 2]
This is getting messy.
Where I’ve landed, as promised, is neither firm or satisfying.
But here goes: the concept I’ve been thinking the most about in relation to my Betty interaction is what you might call proximity bias. A quick Google tells me that this phrase is usually used in HR, to discuss managers’ bias toward in-office employees and against remote workers.
But it’s a phrase I use mentally to describe a thing we see a lot in the news: the way that Americans tend to see their own finances as fine but the broader economy as fucked, or their own representative as fine but Congress as broken.
And relatedly, I think you can apply it to interpersonal relationships – the Republican/Democrat next door is fine, but their party as a whole is the worst. Or, say, that reporter you’re talking to is fine but The Media as a whole is the worst.
I think I can distill this all down to two takeaways:
First, this kind of proximity bias is bad when it comes to reality (hot take: it would be best if people could perceive the world as accurately as possible).
But it’s at least rational and efficient when it comes to interpersonal relationships. It’s not only possible to be courteous to someone with whom you disagree — even whom you think is actively harming democracy — it’s just easier.
And second, I’m thinking a lot lately about access to voters, as opposed to access to politicians. As long as voters are told the media is bad, and as long as also we are having mildly adversarial conversations with those voters (for example, telling Trump voters that Biden won, even when said voters don’t believe it — see/hear the voter I cite toward the end of this story) — I fear that fewer and fewer will want to talk to us.
I’m not sure what to do about that beyond just keeping on.
As long as people like Betty talk to me (and as long as I do a good job of representing their views, which I do), I can at least keep telling people why voters think the way they do. I genuinely hope that doesn’t change.
[pause]
This feels like it ventured into sappy territory. I can hardly stand it. OK, let’s move on to links.
Links! Links! Links!
MY STUFF:
Republicans just don’t care about electability this year. In 2020, Dems were panicking as they couldn’t decide who could beat Trump. This time around? Republican voters aren’t freaking out about defeating Biden…they’re just looking for the nominee they like best. I asked voters why.
Biden and Harris bring abortion front and center. We talked on the NPR Politics Podcast about how Democrats are making reproductive rights central to their 2024 campaigns.
OTHER STUFF:
Support news media you love: It’s rough out there. The LA Times laid off 20% of its newsroom this week. There are more layoffs all the time. Support your local news outlets, is what I’m saying. Go pay for a subscription somewhere.
The best writing on Poor Things I have seen: I saw Poor Things. I really really really did not like it. This masterful New York piece by Angelica Jade Bastien captures why perfectly: “[T]here’s a corroded spirit to the story, like it’s intermittently possessed by an edgelord who’s unaware most women menstruate, and an early-wave white feminist who believes having sex is the most empowering thing a woman can do.” Excellent writing, excellent ideas, excellent article.
Joyful internet thing you had forgotten existed: Aretha singing “You Make Me Feel Like (a Natural Woman)” at the Kennedy Center Honors. Not only is The Queen Herself singing, and not only does she take off her fur coat midsong like a boss, but Carole King is losing her mind cheering her on, and it’s wonderful. (For Kennedy Center Honors extra credit, witness Heart absolutely killing “Stairway to Heaven.”)